I just thought of couple of scenarios;

In addition to the i2c pins, there's the IRQ pin which was said to be wired in GPIO in the device. Now, as normally it is meant to serve as input line from the peripheral to the device, I assume it can also be programmed to act as output.

So, if normally IRQ is pulled up and the peripheral asserts it to zero when it has somethiing to say, could not the master device also assert it to zero to reset the peripheral? (it's no brainer to wire it so in the peripheral end...)

Additionally, if have a device that does not create events itself and has no need for signalling the master device I assume that this line could be used as extra data line to potentially double the downlink bandwidth, for example that a display-like peripheral could be refreshed faster...

And one thing still, is the Vout pin software controllable, meaning can I power-on/power-off the peripheral easily?